


Afternoon Snacks

by pathsofpassion



Series: Second Chances Verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fluff, Candy, Domestic Castiel/Dean Winchester, Domestic Dean Winchester, Domesticity, Easter, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Teenagers, but the focus is on Dean and Emma for now, daddy!dean, daddy!destiel, domestiel, emma's issues with food are going to be an ongoing theme in this story, post-purgatory issues, so is her trauma re: sam and also re: purgatory, this series will include cas and destiel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-21 05:03:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3678645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathsofpassion/pseuds/pathsofpassion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kids - a kid, even if she is past-sixteen and not really human and spends most of her time hiding - make you notice things you usually don't. Like the Easter aisle in the local supermarket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean had gone to the store just for the basics – milk, eggs, bread, hamburger. Nothing fancy, nothing special, but his entire short list has been forcefully ejected from his mind and he is now staring, wide-eyed, at the aisle in front of him.

The aisle that looks like an explosion of pastel pinks and greens and purples and yellows. 

And usually he doesn’t give a damn, really, usually he doesn’t even blink. Sure, he’ll buy the candy half-off the morning after, but the Winchesters haven’t done Easter since Sam was ten. (He stopped believing in the Easter bunny when he was ten and a half exactly, and Dean tries not to remember why, because his dad getting drunk and railing at them on November 2nd when he found Sam’s stash of Halloween candy, shouting that Santa and the Easter bunny weren’t real but monsters fucking were, wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good childhood memory). 

But. 

Emma’s never had an Easter. He doesn’t know if she knows what Easter _is_.

Damn, he doesn’t even know what she likes. Dean reaches for one of the carrot-shaped bags of Reese’s Pieces, then hesitates over a chocolate bunny. Does she like chocolate? She’s a teenage girl, right? She’s gotta like chocolate. 

But Emma and food is a tricky, complicated subject. Dean remembers not feeling hunger or thirst in Purgatory, and Benny’s said he didn’t have to feed. Didn’t _have_ to. Doesn’t mean he didn’t. Purgatory was designed to be one long Hunger Games without a winner, an endless battle for survival that wasn’t about food. Throw a buncha predators together and show how monstrous they are, killing each other when they don’t even need to eat. If and what Emma ate in Purgatory is not a discussion they’re having, ever, not unless she brings it up. 

So far she’s liked simple things, as much as she’s _liked_ anything. Uncomplicated. Plain steak and scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes. Peanut butter and jam had been too complex or too sweet for her taste, much to Cas’s disappointment. She might not like candy at all.

Dean bites his lip, then starts filling his basket. 

*** 

He spreads the haul across the library table when he gets home, a little of everything: a small packet of mini-Cadbury eggs, cause otherwise Sam will eat them all. One of every kind of other candy egg he could find, Reese’s and Snickers and a caramel and chocolate and cream. A couple small chocolate bars and a packet of Skittles and Rolos, some licorice. Swedish fish. Fucking Peeps. He’d wandered away from the Easter candy after a bit, figuring that once Emma decided what she liked, he could go back and stock up. Do a real Easter, with a basket and everything. 

Dean waits. Still doesn’t have a reliable way of finding Emma when he wants her. He can shout, sure, but it never actually brings her to him, and he’s spent enough hours looking for her to know that if she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t be. He could cheat, use Cas to track her down, but. He’d rather not. Doesn’t wanna create hard feelings there. Doesn’t want to use his semi-angel _it’s complicated and hopefully long-term_ against his unfledged Amazon daughter. Doesn’t wanna push into her space if he’s not welcome.

But if he sits, and is still, isn’t doing anything. If she’s interested, she’ll find him. Usually doesn’t take long. Dean should probably be more concerned that he can’t tell how often she’s watching him or if she even is, but he’s trying not to borrow trouble, here. 

Shiny packaging apparently works in his favor; Emma appears in the doorway after only a couple minutes. Looks between him and the array of frou-frou’d candy on the table, like she’s questioning her welcome. Dean jerks his head, beckoning her closer.

And she knows that, the c’mere gesture of his head nodding. It’s like Cas all over again, back when he was an angel, back when he first fell. Figuring out what Emma knows because it’s ingrained and what she has learned from watching, what she still needs to learn. Reminds Dean of that time all too clearly. Makes his heart pinch, maybe just a little, because he got Cas. Took a few years and a lotta heartache, but he did, and he’s got Emma, too, now. Maybe he’ll even get to keep them both.

She picks her way to the table; there ain’t a damn thing on the floor between him and her except that ugly rug, but Emma still walks like she’s on uneven forest ground, like she’s carefully stepping around dangers only she can see. But when she sits, she does it like a normal teenage girl – granted, a normal teenage girl who’s on red alert _all the fucking time_ but she still drops into her seat, folds her arms on the table. Plops her head down so that she can stare at the spread of candy with bewildered green eyes. They dart around the room at regular intervals, like always, checking for danger like always, but those eyes keep coming back to the candy. 

“So. Uh.” Dean rubs the back of his neck and this is probably a bad idea, but he’s never backed out of a bad idea at the halfway point in his life, and he can shoulder his way through this too. Easter is maybe too complicated for right now; this is just the test run, figuring out whether Em even _likes_ any of the crap he bought. If she does. Then, then he can explain. Ask. Plan. Fuck, something.

“Candy.” She says it half a question, her head tilted sideways because when she’s not stalking him Dean’s 70% sure she’s stalking Cas.

Candy, so she knows that, good. Sam got her a tablet and set it up with like, Netflix and Hulu and other crap Dean doesn’t even remember. And Emma hangs out in the very back of the room when they watch TV sometimes, too, so. She sees commercials, advertisements. She knows what candy is. 

(Dean thinks Sam was trying to get Emma to stop flinching when he walks into a room. Dean knows it didn’t work.)

“Yeah. Try this.” He pushes the plain, classic Hershey’s bar towards her first. Watches as nimble fingers strip open the wrapping and break off one little square. The square goes in her mouth; Emma’s eyes go wide, startled, and she sucks for a minute before her nose scrunches ever so slightly. “That a no?” Dean asks, and if she doesn’t like chocolate he’s in trouble. 

“Too sweet,” Emma explains, surveying the rest of the haul with more interest than she’s shown in just about anything yet. “But good?” 

Too sweet, huh. Dean picks through the pile of brightly colored candy until he hits on a small bar of dark chocolate. Nudges it toward her. “Don’t chew it, let it melt.”

The dark chocolate pops into her mouth and Emma’s eyes go wider than before; this time there’s less of a nose-crinkle, only a tiny one at the beginning. She makes a sound, a happy humming noise that Dean recognizes as something he does when he bites into a perfect burger. He tries a smile, sending it across to her crooked and soft, and gets a chocolate-smeared careful grin in return. It’s the easiest he’s seen her smile. It might be the _first_ time he’s seen her really smile.

He doesn’t blame her. He knows it’s complicated as hell between them. She likes him, he thinks (hopes prays), she wants a relationship with him, but she also blames him. Fears him. She has every right to it, after all.

They’re doing their best. 

“You pick what you wanna try next,” Dean says, cause she’s a kid but she’s also not and he gets that, he does. Sometimes he even tries to act like he understands that she’s not five and he can’t bundle her away from the world and decisions forever.

Emma pokes a finger into the pile, pushing aside an Almond Joy and all three kinds of Cadbury egg. She tries the Skittles and nearly spits them out; she tries the Swedish fish and eats them one by one, chewing thoughtfully. None of the Easter-y candies make much of an impression; she likes the caramel Cadbury best, and the chocolate truffle egg the worst, but none of them get the hum of approval or the slow savoring that the dark chocolate and Swedish fish received. 

(The Peeps were treated the worst. Emma pulled one out of the little box and squished it curiously with her fingers, gave him a betrayed look as the coating stuck to her skin, as the squishy marshmallow shaped itself under her touch. The Peeps did not get tasted. Emma seemed to be of the belief that they didn’t qualify as _food_. Dean did not argue the point.)

The big hit, though, the one that makes the whole exercise worth it, is when she picks open the carrot-shaped bag of Reese’s Pieces. The peanut-butter cup egg had gone in the “yes, that’s alright” pile in Dean’s mind; Emma had eaten it all, instead of taking a bite or two and setting it aside, but she hadn’t seemed to love it. 

But those little round orange candies? 

Emma stuck one in her mouth and _froze_ , still and sudden. Dean almost tensed, unsure what he was tensing for but trying to be ready for anything she needed; her hand clutched around the opening to seal the bag and she said, “Can I keep these?” with a tiny shake in her voice, and he relaxed.

He doesn’t know what to do with that teeny little quaver. He gets it, hell, he gets it, he almost cried when he was nine because Dad took them to Bobby’s and that meant Bobby cooking dinner while Dad was on a hunt, instead of Dean trying to find another version of mac and cheese that Sam would eat. Dean knows what it means to be hungry, and he knows what it means to have an inhuman craving, a _thirst_ ; he spent a night as a fledgling vampire. He knows the difference between food you eat because it keeps you alive and food you eat because you like it.

Still doesn’t mean he knows what it feels like to be a teenage Amazon fresh outta purgatory, and he is painfully aware that he _can't_ know that. Not really.

This is the first time she’s _asked_ him for anything. Directly, at least. Maybe that’s more important than all the rest combined. 

“Yeah.” He clears his throat, waves at the half-hearted massacre of sugar and sweet. “Anything you want.” 

She pulls a piece of string out of her pocket, ties the bag of Reese’s pieces shut. Watches him and waits til he looks at her again, then says very carefully, “Thank you, D-.” Pause, the word cutting off, but he thinks it sounded like a, not e. The pause is tiny, but when she speaks again the word she says is, “Dean.” 

His heart doesn’t stop, in that small pause, and start up again. Doesn’t. 

“Yeah, sure.” And then because he should be trying to teach his kid manners, “You’re, uh. Welcome.” He’s not sure he’s said that non-sarcastically before. Ever. 

So. She likes dark chocolate and Reese’s and Swedish fish and maybe the caramel Cadbury eggs. He can work with that. He made Sam’s Easters out of stolen drug store shit; he can work with this. If he can make Easter make sense to her. Maybe. 

Emma is watching him think, and he realizes that she’s got a wry little twist in the corner of her mouth. “I know what Easter is. Sam gave me the internet.” 

She doesn’t trip over Sam’s name or capitalize Internet, and that almost distracts him from what she said. Dean scowls, unaccountably disappointed, though he doesn’t show it. “What, you readin’ my mind now, too?” 

A faint laugh bubbles out of her, and it’s genuine even if it’s a little dry, a little darkly shaded. “Not one of my… perks.” 

And Dean. Laughs. Can’t help it, because she sounded so damn like him that it ached inside. Part of him wonders if she did that on purpose, is mimicking him on purpose, and he roughly shoves the thought aside. “Guess it isn’t. So what, you’re just – going through Wikipedia all day?” He’s curious, really, about what she’s learned, how she’s learned it, how learning from the internet with its vast resources both good and terrible is different from learning in real time, in human social interaction and endless high schools and TV as a babysitter. Maybe they aren’t so badly matched, the two of them. 

“Wikipedia.” Emma ticks off on her fingers. “Reddit, Netflix. Google. The New York Times.” Both her eyebrows go up and the nose-crinkle is back. “Urban dictionary.”

Snorting, Dean steals a red gummy fish from the middle of the table. “Careful, half that shit’s made up.” 

“I hoped so.” Emma sniffs disdainfully, and he grins at her. 

“Easter. You in?” 

The girl pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, heels on the seat of her chair as she gives him a considering look. “What will Easter be?” 

He hadn’t thought that far ahead, really, hadn’t thought beyond finding out what candy to get her. Dean leans back in his chair and rubs his jaw as he thinks. As kids, they didn’t do much. He remembers Easter from before his mom died, but John didn’t do anything after. Dean started hiding shit for Sam in maybe… first, second grade? But all he really managed was hiding some candy around in the cheap plastic eggs, it wasn’t like he could do a basket or an Easter dinner. 

Huh. “Dinner.” he decides. “Make a basket for everyone, hide ‘em, then do dinner.” And he’s not asking but he is, because this is about her. For her. Maybe asking her to sit down to supper with Sam and Cas and him all in the same room is too much, but it would be good practice for Thanksgiving. “Hey, we could invite Charlie, call Benny.” 

She hasn’t met Charlie yet, because Dean has maybe sort of not told the best friend that he _isn't_ sleeping with about his teenage daughter. Though he should. Damn. He called Jody for some parenting tips, for help with Teenage Girl 101, but a lot of that didn’t apply to Emma anyway. 

Or it hadn’t in the beginning, when she was half-feral and trembling, fleeing at every loud noise. Maybe. She’s been here two months now; maybe he should ask Jody for that crash course again. Regardless, he should’ve called Charlie. 

Emma goes still. “No Charlie?” Dean asks because, fuck. Having a really fucking traumatized daughter around has done wonders for his communication skills. Emma _couldn't_ articulate what she needed to, a lot of the time, in those first weeks. He started trying to guess. Trying to see things from her perspective, desperate to do anything to make her not quite so on edge. She’s gotten better about talking, sometimes. But not always. 

“I want to meet Charlie.” The words are careful and this is news, because Emma hasn’t displayed a lot of interest in Charlie or Jody or anyone outside the bunker yet except Benny. 

Oh. “Dinner with Sam,” he says, and it isn’t a question. Emma looks away. 

Dean looks down at the table, because right. Easter dinner with someone who killed you would be awkward. Sam and Cas have both individually beaten him bloody on more than one occasion, but they’ve never actually killed him. And he was a grown-up when that shit happened, not fucking fourteen going on three days. 

He wonders if it’s asking too much of her. If it will always be asking too much of her. 

He looks up and she’s gone. But she took the Reese’s with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may/probably will be a second or third chapter to this, but I haven't written it yet and the likelihood of it being up before Easter is nil. So have some feels?


	2. Chapter 2

Her path back to this week’s bedspace is twisty, complicated. Emma knows that Cas can find her without a blink of effort, that Benny could sniff her out if he came around, but they’re not who she’s hiding from. Not just hiding. This isn’t. This is not living in terror, this is not Purgatory. 

Next to Purgatory this is heaven, though she lives with people now who do not use that word lightly.

 _Heaven_ tastes airy on her thought-tongue, comes freely to the voice of her mind. 

Human-people, people who are not angels or vampires, people that are related to her and far too tall or far too loud – those kinds of people cannot find her easily, and that is all Emma asks. 

She wends her way through the storage rooms and back passages of the bunker, up a staircase that doesn’t look like it’s been disturbed in fifty years apart from her own small footprints. Climbs through a blocked-off section of wide, ancient air duct that she is just slim enough to wriggle into, and comes out on top of a stack of big, broad crates piled high. There’s maybe four feet between the top of the highest crate and the ceiling, in this corner with two sturdy walls to protect her, and that is where Emma has made her current – nest. 

Room. It’s her room. Humans don’t nest and she’s trying to be human, she is, so this is her room. It’s just kinda… mobile. 

She tacked up heavy drapes that she found in a storage room several moves ago; she strung up battery-powered Christmas lights Cas left on the dining room table at two in the morning last month, a deliberate and cherished gift. 

Emma turns the lights on and flops onto her bed. She covered the top of the crate with a thick, scavenged foam pad and blankets. So many blankets. The bunker’s previous occupants had a serious bedding fixation; she doesn’t think they’re ever gonna run out of blankets, or pillows. Those she took certainly have not been missed. And yeah they were kind of dusty, but they were _real_ and warm and not covered in blood. There hadn’t been anything like _blankets_ , Before. 

And _pillows_. Yes. This is heaven, and if heaven comes with confusing emotions and unfamiliar dangers, it still shines far above purgatory. 

Rolling onto her side, Emma takes the precious sack of tiny morsels of bliss from her pocket and tucks it in the space that serves as her nightstand, a portion of the crate top she left clear. The carrot-shaped bag of Reese’s pieces settles next to her Galaxy and a heavy flashlight, side-by-side with her biggest knife and a package of Saltine crackers. She has a bottle of water and the can of soda she’s trying to like this week; right now it is Sprite. She drinks the water most often, fills it up from an empty bathroom two corridors away, because clear sweet water is still the most luxurious of things to her. You don’t need to drink in purgatory, you don’t feel the thirst, but you still crave wet to wash down the dirt and the death and there’s no water in purgatory except for a filthy, dangerous stream. 

Her hand snags the black tablet – comparatively small, next to the laptops upstairs, but containing infinite wonders still.

On a whim that tastes as dark and bitter as the chocolate she’d liked, Emma opens up Chrome and types “how to forgive someone who killed you” in the search bar. 

The first page of search results is about forgiving murders of family members, or murderers who are family members. The second might be useful but the first makes her chest pang, so she opens a new tab and closes that one. Google is nearly all-knowing, but she doesn’t think it can help her live with her uncle. 

Or forgive her father.

She’s not sure right now which is harder. 

She doesn’t _want_ to forgive Sam. She’s not ready for that, nowhere near; he has been nothing but awkwardly, distantly kind since they brought her to this place, to Kansas. And Emma knows he is giving her space, and she appreciates it, and. And. She gets it. You know? She does. She _watches_ , and the depth of the care between Sam and Dean is glaring, obvious. They look to each other. They are family in a way that transcends blood; they have a way of fitting together side-by-side, of instinctive knowledge that (TV and books would tell her) only comes from living with someone you love for years and years and years. 

They aren’t peaceful and they aren’t easy and they are never ever ever _quiet_ , but they are a special kind of family. 

A kind that makes her ache to belong to it, even as she sets herself on the outside. 

Cas fits into the Winchester dynamic – not like he was born to it, but like they grew around him, like they changed to encompass him in the thing that is _them_ , that is _family_. She’s been given a vague history in bits and pieces from various (highly suspected to be unreliable) narrators; she knows that this slotting of Cas into what he is now to both Winchesters was the work of years. The topic tends to lead to a lot of trailed-off, ominous silences that she has taken to indicate dangerous times. 

So she _gets it_. She does, really. If someone threatened Benny or Dean or Cas, she would do her best to hurt them. Stop them. Kill them. She understands.

That doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t make anything okay. 

If someone threatened Sam – 

She doesn’t know. 

Rolling over, Emma places a hand on her stomach. It’s nice to feel the softness there, the give. Her muscles are strong and lean but there are a few layers of padding now, of healthy softness that say _I am eating_ and _I am not always running_. Unfamiliar, but good. A lot like the candy upstairs. 

He’s trying so hard. He’s trying so hard that _she_ can see it and she’s still working on acting even remotely human, much less understanding them. And maybe understanding people won’t help all that much with understanding Dean anyway, because her father is a – “unique, special, complicated, _frustrating_ man,” in the words of the angel living a few stories above where she is now.

If she believed in any kind of god she would pray for mercy, for both of them. Time seems to slip through her fingers like water, like she’s growing up too fast when she used to not be growing up at all, and she knows what it is to go from newborn to fourteen in three days. 

(What faith she had been taught died a quick and bloody death in the mud and muck of monster-hell. A Goddess worth worshiping would have saved her.)

Mostly though, right now. She’s safe in her space, and she doesn’t want to think about Easter dinner yet, about the prospect of sitting down for a whole meal with multiple people and also Sam. Her tongue feels a little sick of sweetness, a little raw from the small matte eggs in the purple package, with the hard shell. She hadn’t liked those. Under her hand, her stomach grumbles; she didn’t eat much, only sampled a bit of many things, and she last ate – when?

Emma brings her hand up to peer at it in the glow from the Christmas lights. There’s a mark on the heel of her palm in black sharpie that says _A.M._ On the side of her index finger are six tick marks, messily refreshed over several days.

So she needs to move her room after one more sleep, and she last ate this morning. The clock on the Galaxy says 4:00 pm; if she goes to the kitchen now, she can probably avoid seeing Sam, and she won’t need to go back until tomorrow morning. Eating twice a day is a minimum requirement, and as much as she dislikes it she is not willing to sacrifice strength to lack of nutrients now that she _must_ eat. 

Her stomach makes another rough, hungry sound. Emma glares down at it, then glances across to the bag of Reese’s, but no. Those are to be savored, to be eaten with care, not to be swallowed down in a bunch because her traitorous body wants food. 

Up, then. She turns off the lights and the Galaxy to conserve power; shimmies back into the air duct. Heads toward the kitchen.


	3. Chapter 3

Castiel lifts his head from his survey of the library table; Dean had come to their room, and after offering what comfort he thought might be accepted, Cas relocated to the scene of the crime, as it were.

Dean was not frequently in a mood for comfort, not on this subject. Not ever, if Castiel acknowledged the breadth of his acquaintance with the Winchesters. Comfort for Dean is best given sideways, through food or companionship or letting him pick the subject of their television-viewing hours without argument. Small blessings that Dean can accept without depreciating his own value, his own worthiness to be consoled.

Even if he hadn’t been keeping an eye on their souls, glowing bright as stars through weak man-made constructs of metal and cement, he would have known that Dean spoke with his daughter. His face carried a particular weight after talking with Emma, a darkness around the edges of his eyes, a heaviness in the turn of his mouth, responsibility and worry furrowing his brow.

And light. That should not be forgotten. Even when their conversations do not end well, Emma’s presence in the bunker gives Dean a brightness to his eyes and a warmth to his voice. Small blessings for which his gratitude is immense.

Sam has said that Dean gained a similar light when Castiel began staying in the bunker. Cas doesn’t know if he believes that, but it’s nice to hear.

He had been inspecting the trappings of Easter, as experienced through the lens of Dean Winchester, but now Castiel walks toward the kitchen.

Walks. Because he could fly, but he enjoys the stretch of his feet, the roll of his soles against the inside of his shoes.

And, too. Emma dislikes sudden movements, and she _particularly_ dislikes it when he flies into rooms. If he flew to the kitchen, he’d be alone in seconds. He wants to spend time with the girl, not terrify her into scurrying away.

When he is a few feet from the open archway, Castiel lets his footsteps fall a little heavier. Yes, she should have heard him by now, but he tries to be extra-careful not to startle her.

She is still, watching the doorway as he enters it. Not startled, but wary. She is crouched in front of the fridge, comfortable enough not to withdraw from what she was doing, but she is not _relaxed_ , either.

“Hello, Emma.” He tries to make the words sound fond enough to match the feeling in his chest. Thinks that he succeeds, maybe, because she watches him for another moment then almost-smiles, and turns her head back to look into the fridge again. Her eyes crinkled, ever so slightly, her mouth softening. He remembers smiling when he first learned to do it, in Jimmy’s body. They are not dissimilar.

She says, “Castiel.”

He waits. Cas has learned patience when dealing with Winchesters, and Emma is more like her father than anyone but Sam can see. “He sent you to check up on me, huh?”

“I could be hungry,” he says, wry and with a twist at the corner of his mouth, a private dryness because in his current state he can, in fact, experience hunger. However that was not his main purpose, and disingenuity will get nowhere with Emma.

Because she is her father’s daughter, and has a talent for picking up on the things people least want her to hear, she notices the faint thread of discomfort in his tone. Asks, “Do angels even need to eat?” as she stands up, sandwich components neatly grasped in her small hands.

Cas lets her see the quirk of his lips, shows her a glimpse of tired but peaceful acceptance. “Only when they stop being angels.”

She gets it. Dean is intelligent, intuitive in the ways of _people_ , and Emma is and is not like him. Like him because she understands Cas’s meaning. Unlike him because she does not get belligerent, does not push for answers and information, acknowledges that he does not desire to speak on the matter of his slow slide into humanity to anyone yet.

She changes the subject, and he cannot tell if it is to ease the awkwardness of their conversation, or if it is because she is a teenager, and inherently focused on analyzing both herself and the world. With much more additional baggage than most teenagers, perhaps, but a teenager nonetheless.

Everything Cas knows about teenagers has been learned in the last eight weeks. He thinks, privately, that he is doing better than Sam, than Dean; he does not expect her to be _normal_ , while her blood relations desperately want her to have what they did not, growing up under John Winchester’s dubious version of care.

“I didn’t need to either. There.” She rarely says ‘purgatory’ out loud. Castiel straightens, and sits down at the table. Two plates have been placed, and Emma is not looking at him. Her eyes are focused on her hands as she builds two hearty hoagie sandwiches.

“Benny mentioned that.” Dean worries about her eating. Cas worries about her, too.

“I didn’t.” Blonde hair is a curtain around her face, now, falling down in bangs over her forehead and obscuring her eyes. (When she first arrived, Dean took her for an ill-conceived and disastrous haircut attempt. Emma had been too shaken in the barber’s chair to allow another person holding sharp implements that near her face and neck after the first few snips creating her bangs; Castiel thinks that they should have foreseen that, but none of them did. Her hair is longer now, the bangs swept to the side, growing out).

He waits.

“There. I didn’t eat, there.” She says it with the quiet knowledge that Dean worries about her, about her and food. He wonders how much, if anything, the young woman in front of him misses. How much she understands and sees that they don’t realize. They try to be honest with her, it was Dean’s first and most fervent request, but some things they have deemed unsuitable for her ears.

She’s only seventeen. Seventeen and five and eighty. He’s pretty certain that there is no right answer.

“I think that’s why I hate eating so much here. The – dependency.”

Yes, he can understand that. He has experienced this, the change between needing nothing and having to constantly worry about getting enough to eat.

“It feels strange.” His voice is quiet, knowing. He lets it be. “To eat, at first. Every flavor is intense. Every texture is unfamiliar and odd. When you have not needed to eat for a long time, everything you try is overwhelming.”

She should know that she never need worry about having enough to eat in their care, but he knows not to bring that up.

She’s quiet for a moment, and then. “Yeah. That, too.”

“Sandwiches?” Cas asks, because she picked their lunch.

Emma looks up, now, and those familiar eyes are warm. He is starting to see the differences despite the similarity of their gazes, because the person looking out at him may share some qualities with the man he loves, but she is not Dean. She is Emma, and she is inherently valuable because of that. He doesn’t think Dean quite understands. Emma probably doesn’t either, but Cas would love her, would worry for her and fret for her, even if she shared no blood with his two favorite people. He holds… bias, to be certain. Is inclined to view fondly anyone whom Dean loves. But she is herself, and he thinks he would have loved her without any bias at all. “I’m working on it,” she says, and he smiles.

(He had not expected to love her beyond the baseline, beyond his inherent care for humanity as a whole. She is not his to love. And yet. She grew quickly into her own place in his heart, like Sam, like the Impala. Dean needed her to be loved, but he didn’t need Cas to care about her like _this_. Like a father. Like she holds her own place in him separate from being a Winchester.  All of humanity is worth loving, to an angel, but Cas has always been a little unangelic. He has always loved Dean, and Sam, in ways that differ from his love for the rest of Creation. And now Emma.

He wonders how many different ways there are to love someone.

Thinks that when he is fully human, he will find out.)

They eat. Quietly, because neither of them need to chatter to fill a silence. Sam can eat in quiet for a time, but he will eventually speak. Dean can’t eat in silence to begin with.

“Do you.” She has neatly and quickly finished. Cas is messier, more used to the line between being and acting human – or acting human enough that you are human, enough. Emma draws her legs up to sit on them, crossed beneath her. “He wants. Easter?”

Ah. He can’t blame her for the connection; _angel_ , after all. “That was not my doing. The stores are more likely to blame.”

But she doesn’t get that, because they haven’t yet managed to coax her into any such establishment. Her eyes narrow and her head tips to one side, all silent question.

She is far more human than he is; explaining these things always feel awkward, but Cas tries. He thinks that it helps; Dean and Sam have never experienced anything quite like what Emma is going through, acclimatizing to an entirely foreign culture of _humanity_.

“They have – seasonal displays.” Unlike her, he has been dragged into grocery stores with Dean. “Aisles that they change depending on the time of year, on holidays.”

“So this is gonna happen for – Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving?”

He has to run through his memories, the knowledge he’s pulled from both Dean and Sam, his experience watching not just humanity, but the very particular and small section of humanity that comprises the last twenty-odd years of American culture. “Not Memorial Day, not Labor Day. I don’t think Dean notices those, except for how they relate to food.”

To be fair. That could be said for most holidays.

The Winchesters do not honor their fallen dead on Memorial Day. The number is too high.

“Fourth of July is fireworks. Explosions. Dean will burn his fingers trying to blow something up and refuse any help from me.” He has experienced this firsthand. Smiles at the memory. “Thanksgiving will be a – family dinner.” If there’s anyone left who will come.

“Like Easter.” He hadn’t known that Dean’s plans included an Easter dinner, but is unsurprised. “He wants. Benny, Charlie.”

Probably Jody.

And of course, the real problem.

He looks at her. Waits. She’s only seventeen, and he is both a semi-celestial being with millennia of patience, and someone who has dealt with her father on a daily or near-daily basis for the last several years. He is certain he can outwait her.

Cas doesn’t wait long. “Sam.”

Yes, he. Thought that might be the case. He’d have to be blind to _not_ see that problem.

“If you tell him you’re uncomfortable, Dean will skip dinner.”

She shrugs, doesn’t look at him. “And you’ll yell at me for disappointing him?”

“Emma.” Cas frowns, waits til she looks at him. “You know that isn’t true.”

He gets a gusty sigh of acknowledgment, her lower lip sticking out as she blows air up, puffing at the length of her bangs. Learned behavior. Emma is not naturally comedic, has spent more time without other people than with them – did not have to learn to be funny or charming to survive in a variety of high schools, like her father, her uncle, who can turn on humor and ease like flipping a switch. Only here in the Bunker has Emma begun to learn the value of easing difficult moments with the ridiculous.

It’s a lesson he rather wishes she wasn’t picking up. There are better defense mechanisms, surely.

“I know,” she says, and he hopes she does. That she really does know. No matter the status of his relationship with Dean – something that is, at the best of times, complex and multifaceted – he would care for her. That he would not scold her for making choices to preserve her own peace.

Humanity, he is reminded time and time again, is _complicated_.

“I don’t _not_ want to do the dinner thing.” Emma picks at the crumbs left on her plate, smushes them together. “I wanna meet Charlie.”

“They don’t need to be the same,” Cas says, careful. “We can invite Charlie and Benny to visit without Easter, without a dinner.”

But the girl’s face scrunches up, definite, _no_. And she is likely right; even without the holiday excuse, if they asked the scattered family to come in, there would likely be some form of a group meal. Communal sharing of food and safety has been a hallmark of human’s social units for millennia; even Cas has fond memories of eating and talking, laughing, with Charlie and the Winchesters. With Jody when she stops by. Quieter, midnight meals with Emma and Dean.

He is not foolish enough to tell her that Sam will not harm her. Emma knows this already, to the extent that it matters; beyond that extent it is a lie, as Sam will harm anything and anyone that threatens his brother, including Emma. Including Castiel himself.

Nor does he tell her that she would not be the only source of awkwardness, or that Sam and Benny’s relationship is at best strained. This would not be helpful.

“It’s up to you, Emma.” Cas has finished his own sandwich by now, folds his hands together on the table. “If you want to try, I will be proud of you, and will assist however I can. If you decide you aren’t ready for this, I will still be proud of you, and I will keep your father distracted.”

Ah. A misstep, there. He is usually very careful to say _Dean_ ; Emma’s reaction to Dean’s place in her family is. _Twitchy_.

She doesn’t leave quite quickly enough to escape angelic vision, but she is moving far faster than within the range of human possibility.

She touches his shoulder as she goes, faint, just a tap of fingertips, almost like an apology.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flashback

Benny finds her.

Not finds. Finds isn’t the right word. Benny.

Benny _notices_ her.

Emma had caught the scent as she crept from the shelter up in the big tree by the bone-canyon to the small cave hidden in the hilly south. She’d breathed it in and panicked, scampering up a nearby oak to tremble and bite her bloodied lips and breathe hard, ragged, until she came back to herself and the sun was down and she could _remember_.

That scent. There’d been another with it, far more important, but that scent was why she was _here_.

She tracked Sam Winchester until he reached a place that stank of illicit magic, of portals and portents, and disappeared.

Emma crouched in a scattering of small boulders, and settled in to wait.

The sky brightened and grew dim twice, a third time. She knew distantly that words existed for such things, _day_ and _night_ , but she had no use for the words. Not here.

Not until _now_ , because Sam Winchester emerged from the portal, carrying a soul. Sam Winchester was found by a vampire, who didn’t behave like a vampire should. And now the vampire is looking directly at Emma’s hiding place, where she’s scuttled thirty feet back from the pair. The vampire is _sniffing_ , and she should run.

But there is. That other scent. It clings to the vampire, too, faint but strong enough that she can smell it from here. It makes the middle of her chest hurt.

“Sam,” the vampire is talking, and his voice is honey-slow and easy. “I’m not accusin’ nobody of nothin’, you understand. But there’s a little girl back there that smells an awful lot like _Winchester_.”

She sees the tall one go still. His face does something complicated, something she can see clearly but cannot comprehend. He says, “Dean,” and she flinches.

When she opens her eyes the vampire is _right there_.

Emma squawks out her alarm and scrambles for the tree behind her, scampering up light and quick because that’s the only way you survive this place. But there isn’t – there isn’t _hunt_ coming from the vampire. He’s not stalking her. He’s not looking at her like she’s prey. His eyes are old denim, the color her jeans used to be before they became filthy with blood and mud and grime.

His eyes look. Kind.

She doesn’t think Mama or the Matriarch ever looked at her like that. There was – something similar, maybe, hidden in the green eyes of the person who had that other scent, but it was layered with caution and wariness. The green eyes knew she was dangerous. And maybe it’s just cause the vampire knows she’s no threat to him, but he doesn’t carry those shades of distrust.

She doesn’t know what to do with _kind_.

She hasn’t seen it for two years.

“You wanna come home, chere?” He’s talking to her, the vampire. She doesn’t remember a lot about speech. Sam (danger, threat, danger) is coming closer, but the vampire isn’t minding him at all. Emma darts her gaze between them, unsure who to watch, who is the greater threat.

Sam says _We killed her_ then _I killed her_ but Emma is not listening, is not.

“And you’re sure that was the right choice.” The vampire looks away from her, now, and so they’re both looking at Sam. They both see how he crumples, a little, his shoulders rounding down and his head ducking.

He doesn’t answer.

He does say, “How’d we even get her out? I only have two arms.” He waves them, and something white is glowing in the right one.

“She kill anyone, up there?”

Sam says, “No. She tried to – Dean. But no.”

The vampire looks thoughtful. “Could be. And I could be wrong about this, but could be. That by blood she’s monster enough to get sent here, sure. But she hasn’t turned. She’s not a full blood Amazon. And could be she’s human enough to get through the portal."

Sam is quiet.

The vampire reaches a hand out to her, and smiles. She remembers smiles. He says, “I’m Benny. I’m a friend of your Daddy’s.”

Emma doesn’t move. She looks at him, quiet and still. Looks at his hand, huge, probably big enough to crush her skull. But that’s not where her worry lies.

She looks at Sam.

Benny speaks, though it’s her and Sam looking at each other. Staring, silent, because he killed her and she doesn’t think he regrets it, cause he’s still looking at her like she’s a threat. She is. She is. She’s smaller, but she’s fast and she’s strong. Is she stronger than him?

There aren’t humans in this place. She doesn’t know. She wasn’t stupid enough to seek out the human that was here, once. Everything had been madness then, everyone screaming about hunters and angels and humans and she’d hunkered down in a cave, stayed in one place for nearly a year just to escape the chaos.

Benny speaks, and he says, “I’m not leavin’ her here. Brother.” His voice got hard, and he’s not talking to her.

Sam hasn’t broken eye contact with her til now; he does, runs a hand through his hair. “Dean would just come back in after you,” he says, tired.

Benny’s grin is blinding and full of teeth, catches her eye again. “That’s the idea.”

And they’re staring at each other now, staring and staring, and she’s seen enough battles to know one when it happens right in front of her but she’s never seen people fight like _this_. Not since she was back there, out in the world.

Benny wins.

She knows because Sam looks away first, and Benny looks to her with that easy grin. Reaches his hand back up.

This time she takes it. The scent clinging to his clothes is beckoning her, promising her, and those promises were broken last time but Emma has been alone and frightened and hunted for an eternity in this wasteland, and if going back there means getting broken again at least it will be a different kind of broken.

“You wanna tell us your name, honey?” Benny’s voice. Quick becoming familiar. She can’t trust anything yet to be _safe_ , but this might come close. She can’t find the words quite, but she doesn’t have to. From Benny’s other side her name comes, slow and cautious.

“Emma. I – think. It was Emma.”

She stops.

Stares at him.

Sam Winchester stops too, and turns around, both men do. Benny is looking between her and Sam with a steady danger in his gaze, but it’s not aimed at her and so she ignores it.

Sam clenches his fists. Emma flinches back, then bares her teeth to show she isn’t scared of him, even though she is, she is.

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t understand those words. Not really, not in the way that normal people might; she knows enough to know just how blisteringly abnormal she is.

It might also be the first apology she’s ever heard. Except for girls begging the Matriarch for mercy when they fell short, but no one fell as short as Emma had.

Sam’s lips push together, his hands flex. She’s crouched and half-wild, but she watches. Waits.

“I thought you were trying to kill him. You _were_ trying to kill him,” it’s almost an accusation. “I was protecting my family.”

“I was.” Had she been? Even now Emma didn’t know. She’d felt drawn toward the scent-person with the green eyes, but she’d had a mission too, and she had been a maelstrom of confusion in the small kitchen as she wielded her blade. She thought he would have helped her. She thought he might have tried to save her. She thought he might have succeeded. She thought she could have killed him, and she’ll never know which one it would have been. “I.”

She understands the importance of truth. And truth was that if she had killed him she would have been – “I wanted to be safe.”

Sam nods, and blows a big breath in through his nose. “We can keep you safe. But you can’t kill people.”

She laughs, sharp and harsh. He understands, too, goes red with it because her murderer telling her not to kill people is hilarious and awful, the only funny thing she’s heard in this wasteland of endless death and blood.

“Right. Don’t. Kill people.” She gasps it out, and then lets the laughter die. They are going _out_ , these two, maybe going back to before, back to the world that wasn’t full of nothing but monsters. She cannot trust Sam, but she has to – has to reach some kind of peace, if she wants to get out too.

If she wants a chance to figure out the complicated mess in her head tied up with the not-Benny scent that was all over Benny’s clothes. She is avoiding his name, and his relationship to her.

“I won’t try to kill you if you don’t try to kill me.” That was fair, right? She knows she’d only been in their world a short time, knows she is missing a lot of important information, down to the ability to communicate, but she still has a brain. She can still think, and talk, and reason. Every bit of what they would call humanity hasn’t been stripped out of her just yet.

That offer isn’t good enough, from the wrinkle of Sam’s mouth. “I won’t try to kill him,” Emma adds, because she thought that was obvious, how slow can Sam be? “I won’t kill anyone who isn’t trying to kill me.”

Finally, Sam nods, like only those last two are the ones that matter.

“Now that’s settled, let’s get out of here, hmm?” Benny drawls, looking around at the trees like he hasn’t been staring the two of them down through that whole confrontation. “I didn’t like Purgat’ry enough the first time to hang around again.” He starts walking again, and she and Sam fall back to his sides.


	5. Chapter 5

Dean gets a text that night, around two. Wakes up to Cas reaching over him to get the phone off his nightstand, because he knowsw that the bright flare of the screen will wake Dean anyway but he wants to let Dean keep resting unless it’s urgent; the human half of their _thing_ can fall back asleep a lot quicker if he doesn’t have to peer at the electric glow of the screen.

“Emma sent ‘Yeah, okay’.” Cas holds up the phone and Dean reaches for it, dragging himself up. Not necessary, maybe, but he wants to see for himself.

That’s really all it says. Just. _Yeah, okay_. She likes texting, though she doesn’t with him often. In his darker moments he thinks that she prefers the impersonal nature of it. The distance from him it allows her.

But. Doesn’t matter now. She said yeah, and she really can only be talking about one thing. He backs out of the conversation and opens up a new one, a group text to Benny and Charlie, Jody, Sam. _Easter dinner Sunday, you in?_

Charlie’s a night owl and Benny’s _actually_ a vampire and Jody works night shifts these days; he gets various degrees of assent from everyone within minutes. In the group thread. Another text pops up from Sam, separate, private. _Really?_

_Emma said she’s cool with it_.

No response. He’s not expecting one.

***

He begs, though he doesn’t mean to. Emma has been living on good old plain Earth for two months now. In that time, she has never once set foot inside a store. Not the thrift store for clothes, not a Dairy Queen, not a Target or a Walmart or even a diner. And she sure as hell has not gone to the _mall_. The closest she’s come to capitalism has been the commercials and ads on the internet, plus that one really disastrous haircut in a tiny strip-mall salon.

But when he starts making a list, sitting quietly at the kitchen counter, she comes and sits next to him. Watches the list form in pencil in his blocky handwriting over the rim of her mug. It’s filled with tea, not coffee. Coffee is too bitter and milk is too sweet, but chai with a little sugar – she’ll drink that.

“You, uh. You wanna come with?” He doesn’t look up at her, in case this is a morning where eye contact makes her skittish. Dean taps the word _spiral ham_ on the list with the tip of his pencil. He’ll never admit to searching Google for typical Easter dinner foods. “Gotta go back to the store, get everything if we wanna make dinner tomorrow.”

And then he does look up, because. Because it’s been two months and he loves her too much to think he should let her hide in the bunker forever. It’s her choice, not his, he won’t – can’t – force anything, but. He wants her to be able to go outside without being terrified, interact with other people. Run to the grocery store if they’re all gone on a hunt and she gets hungry.

Oh, hell, there’s something else to worry about. Granted that they’ve cut down on hunting a lot since bringing her home, and granted that he always makes sure they leave a full fridge and pantry behind, but now he’s gonna be _extra_ paranoid about her running out of food when they’re out hunting bad guys. (It’s hard, these days, to say ‘monsters’ without a blade of guilt in his gut).

He’d had that experience a few too many times, at an age younger than she was now. And if Emma ever has to resort to any of the shit he used to have to do to keep him and Sammy fed –

The pencil cracks in his hands, startling them both, but to his surprise Emma doesn’t flee.

She jumps into a crouch on the chair’s seat, knife in hand, gaze darting around for a threat before she tracks the sound to the pieces of broken wood in his hand, but she doesn’t disappear and that’s so much progress that pride in her pushes past any other crap feeling that might want to distract him.

“Sorry,” Dean sighs, dropping the pieces of ex-pencil onto the table. His list is mostly done anyway.

Oh. Maybe it isn’t right for her to come with him if he’s also going to be getting her Easter stuff along with everyone else’s? But she’s seventeen, she knows it’s not coming from the Easter bunny, and she can tell him if he grabs something she doesn’t like as much as he thought she did in their impromptu taste test.

Emma acknowledges the apology with a nod, but it still takes a couple minutes for her to relax back into actually sitting on the chair. Dean pushes his list over to her and tries, he does, he tries not to plead with his eyes or any muscle in his face, but he knows he begs her anyway because she smiles, just a tiny curl in the corner of her mouth. Only for a second. All the more precious for that.

He doesn’t have the right to ask her for a damn thing, but she doesn’t. Right now she doesn’t look like she minds so much?

“Pecans?” She says it ‘pick-AHN’, like some heathen, and he shudders.

“Pecan pie. Gotta have dessert,” and she’s totally laughing at him, amusement sparkling in her eyes though her mouth doesn’t twitch. His life is lousy with only kinda nominally human folks who all have poker faces and only show their smiles in their eyes, but – much to his past self’s surprise, he’s sure – he wouldn’t change it for the world.

Emma does bite into her lip, then, gaze dropping to the list. She runs her finger down the items, and he knows she finds him too loud, too _much_ , so he does his best to sit still and quiet while she thinks. He’s gotten a lot of practice lately.

“Now?” Dean was about to launch into a description of the grocery store, but maybe she’s seen them enough in her self-guided internet and T.V. education. Her question brings him up short and he looks at the clock.

Eleven in the morning on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Fuck, the store is gonna be a disaster.

But waiting isn’t gonna improve it any, and if they go at a time she’ll be more comfortable, late at night when most of the shoppers are asleep, then they might not get everything. “Up to you. It’ll be crowded today, going right now. We can wait until later tonight.”

Yeah. That. He doesn’t care if they don’t get every item on the list, he can make do, but he’s not pushing her into a crowded fucking SuperTarget the day before Easter. “Or you can wait. Come with another time, when it’s quieter.”

“I want to go. Later.” The statement seems to surprise her almost as much as it does him, but she nods and Dean nods back and it’s settled.

***

This is a bad idea.

He’s been thinking about how bad of an idea it is all their hour-long drive into a town big enough to have a big grocery store that’ll be open late. He’s not bringing her into Wally World if he can help it, but even so. This is a bad idea.

Emma’s been quiet in the passenger seat. She’s not huddling by the door, just. Curled up, yawning as she scrolls through something on the tablet Sam got her. At first glance you’d think she’s just a fucking normal teenager. At first glance you might even think she’s actually relaxed.

Hell, she might be. Fuck if he knows. She wouldn’t be the first Winchester to feel safer in Baby than anywhere else.

He’s _pretty_ sure she’s the first Winchester – or Campbell – with her own set of fangs, other than his brief vampire stint. And maybe he should feel horror at that, but the only feeling Dean can scrounge up is a horrible, selfish gladness that she has the innate weapons to defend herself, so he can’t even act like it bothers him. Would tell her in a heartbeat to rip the throat out of any guy, any _person_ who tried to hurt her.

This thing. It’s different, with her, with Sam. He raised Sam and he damn well knows it, always thought he was as much of a parent to Sam as a sibling. And maybe, in some ways, sure. But this?

There aren’t words for this. Dean might have been filling a parent’s shoes with Sam, might have raised him, but he is actually Emma’s _parent_ , and the difference is more profound than he thought possible.

Fortunately they’re coming up on a brightly lit sign and a mostly-empty parking lot, so he doesn’t have to try to find the words, now. Just gratitude that relatively few people go to the 24-hour grocer at two am on Sundays, even Easter Sundays.

There’s a parking spot, right up near the front, safely away from the other cars in the lot. Both of them sit quiet for a second, staring at the big lit entrance, after he’s turned Baby’s engine off. But Emma’s never yet been inclined to stillness that Dean’s seen, and she undoes her seatbelt first. Dean follows, the familiar motions of opening the door and getting out of his car a balm to his nerves, which haven’t settled any now that they’re actually here. He’s got his list in one pocket and a wallet full of Charlie-fixed credit cards in the other, and as much as Dean might want to haul ass back to Lebanon, Emma’s here. Emma’s standing next to the Impala, and he can see disquiet in every line of her body but she’s not running, not ducking back into the car.

If she can be brave enough to try something new and unfamiliar, he can damn well be brave enough to guide her through it.

He starts marching toward the only open entrance, and Emma attaches to his side like a shadow. She gets closer the closer they come to the store, until she’s all but walking on top of him, in his space yet never colliding with him or getting in his way. Amazon speed and reflexes come in handy.

Course, they get a weird look from the only cashier on duty, but he doesn’t think Emma notices so Dean tries not to, either.

He turns to grab a cart and she’s just – standing. There in the entrance, lit by too-bright florescence, and frozen in place. Dean doesn’t breathe, really, for a minute; he’s tensing in time with her, getting ready to follow her back to the car or – _something_ , because the only times Emma is still is when she’s fuckin’ terrified.

Her head turns to him, jerky and slow; her eyes are huge, wide and round and white-edged.

It’s a lot of space. It’s a lot of color and a lotta noise, even this late, even to his senses – there’s the soft radio playing on the speakers and the low hum of the refrigeration cases and the sound of distant carts rolling along the linoleum.

Yeah. Bad idea.

But just as he’s about to reach out to her, she closes her eyes. Shudders. Turns to face forward again, blinking, and takes a step forward. He gets it now; she can’t follow him in here, not into an unknown place with unknown dangers, neither her inhuman nature nor two years in purgatory will let her stay behind him when she doesn’t know what’s around any corner.

She can go _with_ him, though, and his insides ache a little more. Cause fuck, yeah, yeah it’s just a grocery store, there probably isn’t anything in here that can actually hurt her, but _she_ doesn’t know that. Not where it matters, in her gut.

He follows her, pushing the cart until he’s just a step behind her and to the side. Fuck trying to even get their list right now; the store’s 24 hours, it’ll be open all night. Right now – “Left,” he says, and she turns with him.

They make a steady circuit of the store, going up and down every aisle. Every so often Emma will stop and breathe deep, maybe close her eyes for a moment, because the light and the abundance of food is overwhelming (and yeah, there’s another fuck-it-why-didn’t-you-think-of-that-Dean moment, because he could have predicted that taking a kid with severe Issues With Food into a damn grocery store was gonna be stressful for her, if he’d thought about it for half a second).

But she doesn’t leave, she doesn’t disappear on him, she doesn’t run out or away. They end up back at the front, and the clerk has probably seen a hell of a lot weirder than people taking a walking tour of the store in his time because now he barely looks up as they pass the checkout stands.

“List.” It isn’t a question. Dean thinks about protesting, about saying they can go home, but he’s not gonna invalidate her courage like that. He digs out the list and hands it over.

She looks it over, then heads back into the aisles, and he follows.

***

They ended up skipping the baskets, but Baby’s backseat is full of food and candy and nobody had a meltdown or ended up dead, so Dean’s going to count it as a win. Emma takes charge of returning the cart to the cart stand in the parking lot while Dean loads the last couple of bags into the car.

(He’d have liked to get everyone a basket, in theory. In practice they had both stopped and stared at the aggressively pastel monstrosities left in the seasonal aisle, and by silent mutual agreement moved to the next item on the list without even picking one up.)

When both of them are in the Impala with the doors shut and locked, Emma lets out one small, quiet breath, as if she’d held the tension in her the entire time they’d been in the store. She’s not relaxed now, not how she looked on the way in (illusion or not), but she’s not awfully still and controlled, either. She slumps against the door and leans her temple against the cool window, one leg pulling up beneath her.

“Hey.” He doesn’t start the car, not just yet; Emma’s head barely moves, a tilt to let her see him out of the corner of her eye, but she’s listening. And this is awkward and he doesn’t know how to do it, sure as hell never had it done to him, but – “You, uh. Did good in there.”

Dean can see her lips twitch, and her voice is desert-dry when she says, “It’s just a grocery store,” because they both know how very untrue that is.

“You did good,” he repeats, evenly, not looking away from her, and this time she ducks her head. Emma doesn’t respond, but she does reach out her hand and squeeze his, once. So quickly he nearly could convince himself she didn’t, but the – that. The willingness to reach out and touch him, that is precious and new and he has to clear his throat a couple times before he can focus on turning the engine over and getting them on the road to home.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *dashes in and tosses words at* it is spring! have an update.

 

By the time they reach the bunker, Emma’s flexing her hands in quick, repetitive grasps at thin air; her movements have gotten sharper, twitchier, until it’s clear that even the low rumble of Baby’s engine is ratcheting up her tension.

His kid is way, way, way over threshold. Honestly, Dean’s just proud she held it together for the whole trip.

“Go cool off,” he says as they’re pulling into the bunker’s garage. Thinks if he waited til they stopped, she would already have been gone, but he didn’t want her to have any doubt or guilt about leaving him with the bags. “I’ve got this.”

She shoots him one pained, grateful look, and as soon as the car’s in park she’s gone. Dean can barely see her move as she blows past Cas, coming up the stairs from inside the bunker. Like he’s said, Amazon speed is useful; admittedly, so is being able to shoot a prayer for grocery assistance at your angel.

He waits until the faint nod of Cas’s head indicates she’s out of earshot, even for her senses, and slumps against the steering wheel. Dean hears his door open, and leans willingly into the comfort of Cas’s shoulder and the hand that rests on the back of his neck.

Parenting is hard.

“I take it that went… poorly,” Cas ventures after giving Dean a minute of silence.

His mouth kicks up at the corner, and he turns his head to share the wry smile. “She was awesome,” Dean says, honest and proud and exhausted. His grin widens a little, tiredly. “Better’n you.” That had been an adventure, Cas not even trying to pretend to be human as he questioned Dean about the purpose of every single item on the shelves until Dean had to kiss him – in public, in rural Kansas – to shut him up. Cas huffs at him, warm and amused, as if he’s gotten any better at shopping since that first time.

This, Dean is wise enough to keep to himself.

“She did great.” He could have planned better, could probably have made the trip easier on her or just let her stay in the bunker, but that wasn’t new. Was barely a blip on the radar, really. It’s not that he doesn’t care, not that every fuck up he makes with her doesn’t scar across his heart, but all he can do is put her first and do his best to meet her needs. Because being the best parent you can in your circumstances isn’t enough, John Winchester taught him that, but if you’re putting your kid first and doing everything you can think of for their health and happiness - he doesn’t know how to do any better at this than that. And if he’s done that, and he still fucks up, all he can do is learn to do better for the future. Wallowing in guilt doesn’t help Emma or anyone else.

Cas steps back and stands up from his crouch, his hand taking Dean’s to pull him to his feet. They load up together, bags upon bags on each arm, and miraculously it only takes one trip for the two of them to haul everything from Baby’s backseat into the kitchen. Dean spreads it out on the counter and assigns himself the task of determining what needs to go in the industrial fridge and what can be left out; Cas takes the items he’s given and stashes them in the fridge wherever they’ll fit.

They finish in silence, and when Dean tries to go for the living room Cas takes him not-so-gently by the shoulder and steers him toward their bedroom instead. He’s not gonna get a lot of sleep with the sun coming up in a couple hours, but his angel appears to think some sleep is better than none at all.

***

“You cheated.” Dean’s voice is gravelly and rough, and his eyes won’t open just yet, but he can feel that it’s been far more than two or even four hours since he tucked into their bed next to Cas.

“You require rest.” Cas is calm and unruffled, their room quiet except for the turning of a page. “Today will likely be both physically and emotionally taxing.”

Dean squints one eye open, and yeah, Cas might be serious about today being stressful, but the angel also has the crook in his mouth that says he’s deliberately messing with Dean by playing the Angel Who Doesn’t Get Human Bullshit.

Dean’s never sure where the real line between act and truth on that is. Cas absolutely thinks that a lot of what Dean tries to teach him does, in fact, fall under Human Bullshit; for all of his love of humanity and wonder at his father’s creations, Cas considers many of the things the Winchesters do just because “that’s what you do, Cas” to be ridiculous. Cas reveres creativity and ingenuity and _uniqueness_ and can’t be assed to learn the finer points of fitting in.

Granted that his closest and most consistent examples are not exactly great at being human themselves. Sometimes Dean tells Cas that’s the way it is because he doesn’t have another answer.

“I don’t need eight fucking hours of it,” Dean bitches back, rolling over to bury his face in his angel’s thigh. Cas’s fingers card through his hair, absent and gentle; another page turns. He knows Cas can read faster than this, so he must be savoring it for pleasure.

Weirdo.

Also if Cas is touching him with one hand and holding the book with the other he’s gotta be using his grace to flip the pages, which strikes Dean as singularly Cas-like.

He lifts his head to peer across Cas’s lap at the digital alarm on the nightstand; and yep, it’s two in the afternoon. Seven hours, give or take.

He has Shit to Do, dammit.

“You remember that you and Princess Samantha are both banned from the kitchen, right?” Dean grumbles, burrowing back into the welcome cushion of Cas’s thigh. If he’s gonna be behind schedule anyway, another ten minutes won’t hurt. “Last thing I need is the stove on fire.”

He can all but hear Cas squint over at him. “In my defense - “

“It was _caramel popcorn,_ Cas. How hard could it be?”

***

The potato peeler seems. Inefficient.

Emma delicately explores the tool with her fingers; she slept a little, and ate a few of the precious Reese’s pieces.

She had also tried the Reese’s Puffs cereal they’d purchased at the store on the theory that she might like it. Hopefully one of the others will enjoy the cereal and consume it promptly; she will eat it if no one else does, because wasting food is nonsensical, but she won’t enjoy it. That bowl of… _things_ is nothing like her delicious candy.

She isn’t certain how long food preparation is supposed to take for this dinner, but one of the recipes Dean printed out and stuck to the fridge has potatoes listed, and says they need to be peeled. They had purchased potatoes, two whole dirty heavy sacks of them.

She’d seen Dean use the peeler before, on carrots and potatoes and zucchini. He made it look swift and easy, but she doesn’t see how this small hobbled thing will be faster or better than a knife.

Still. This is how humans peel things, and she is trying to be human.

Emma opens the first bag of potatoes and grimaces; the gritty, dusty feel of the bag is worse on the inside, worse on the brown bulges of potato.

It seems wrong, to introduce the shiny, clean (if inefficient) blade of the peeler to the dirty potatoes. Maybe - yes. Dean had stood before the sink when he peeled things, she remembers, with just a little water running to rinse them off.

This is better. Emma gleefully tips the entire bag of potatoes into the sink and plugs it, running cool water into the basin. She will scrub them clean and _then_ peel them and that will be far, far superior.

She hums, content with this plan, and begins to execute it (with minimal spillage, if she does say so herself).

She doesn’t even jump when Dean comes into the kitchen; she’d heard his footsteps, in tandem with Cas’s as they walked up the hall. Though Dean is the only one to enter; Emma slides a sideways glance to Cas, waiting in the entryway, and the grin he sends her is surprisingly rueful. Surprisingly human.

“I’ve been banished,” he explains, a tip of his head nodding at the library while her father just grunts as he starts pulling items out of the fridge. “Sam and I will look for any information on that creature Garth called about.”

Creature, not monster, always careful. She has yet to meet Garth. He doesn’t hunt anymore, she understands, and yet he had called about strange accidents in his area. She guesses that he is driven to protect his family, his locale; the werewolves in purgatory were always extremely territorial. Most things roamed, didn’t want to be tied down to any one place, but wolves _nested_.

Dean isn’t apparently going to respond, and Cas seems to be talking to her, so Emma offers a nod and an “Okay.”

This is the appropriate action, or enough of it; Cas nods back at her and disappears down the hallway toward the library.

“Good job,” comes from her shoulder and this time she does jump, and she also learns why it is wise that the peeler is inefficient. The back of it digs against her hand but doesn’t cut, because it was made to be safe for clumsy cooks.

“Sorry,” then, an apologetic grimace as he takes her hand and inspects it to make sure that she isn’t hurt. Which she might not have been, anyway; her skin is far tougher than his. But the gesture is nice.

So is the praise. “It seemed… easy,” Emma says, cautious. She doesn’t want to overstep, doesn’t want to be intruding, and certainly does not wish to make a mess out of something she doesn’t know how to do. But peeling potatoes seemed fairly straightforward, and. It was… nice, last night. Being involved and doing something together, something that wasn’t watching television or research or awkward conversations.

She liked it. Even though the store had been overwhelming.

“Yeah, but you’re doing good.” His smile is less stunted, a little warmer; he nods to the potatoes. “Keep peeling, between me and Benny and Sam we’re probably gonna need all of those.” Meanwhile he goes to the fridge and pulls out a large ham.

Emma ducks her head, smiles, and reaches for the next clean potato.

***

Dean’s fairly proud of himself, just over two hours in; he doesn’t _think_ he’s been a tyrant. It’s easy in the kitchen to get lost in doing something right or trying to make it perfect, but that’s not real, that’s not how you learn to cook, and it sure as hell isn’t how you build a relationship with your daughter.

Instead, they’ve experimented. He’s shown her how to do things, and answered the preciously rare questions she actually managed to ask; and if the glaze on the ham has more brown sugar and less bourbon than the recipe called for, or the potatoes are less ‘scalloped’ and more ‘plopped’, he doesn’t care and no one else will either.

Emma’s actually a neater chef than he is, but that’s not surprising. As long as everything is _sanitary_ , Dean doesn’t mind his food looking a little rough around the edges. Taste conquers looks in this family, every time, no matter what foodie TV judges say.

Her knife skills need work (though she’d never believe him saying so), but he’s unreasonably pleased by that. Pleased that whatever else she knows with a blade, this is something he can teach her.

He’s tossing the salad because that’s at least 85% for Sam and he’s not gonna make her make it even if Emma doesn’t _know_ that it’s mostly for Sam. She was mixing the glaze for the pie, but her head comes up and her nose twitches.

“Benny’s here,” so it must be dark out, and Dean nods his head toward the door with a grin. He can finish up the rest.

She leaves at human speeds, at least. And he’d be jealous, he would, over how easy her relationship with Benny is - but she’s just spent three hours in a kitchen cooking with him, completely willingly, and Dean’s too damn happy to ache about it right now.

Ah. Benny’s here, but Jody and Charlie are coming too, and Emma doesn’t know either of them; Dean bites his lip and looks at the unfinished pie, then sends up a little prayer that _someone_ monitor incoming arrivals to prevent any stranger-danger mishaps.

***

Cas watches from the library as Benny swoops Emma up in a giant hug, swinging her in a circle around the hallway before putting her down with a chuckle, a ruffling of her hair, and a laconic, “Nice to see you too, _chere_.”

He received Dean’s prayer loud and clear; later, if _later_ is calm and not riddled with anxiety or mishaps, he will tease Dean about both his burgeoning reliance on prayer for common communication, and his instructing _Castiel_ to ensure that the social introductions go smoothly.

His life is, indeed, very strange.

“Angel,” Benny drawls, and comes forward with his hand extended. It’s not friendly, not precisely, for either of them – but they are getting better. It is only a handshake this time, not a test of strength, and their nods are congenial instead of stiff and short. He’d never stood much of a chance of permanently disliking someone Dean loved, and without Purgatory around them, he can be more grateful for Benny’s assistance than jealous of his time with Dean.

Or perhaps that was guilt, more than anything. Cas could have been with Dean, if he’d chosen, though the two of them would have been in far more danger than they’d been in alone. Benny had the freedom to stay at Dean’s side when Castiel himself did not.

“Vampire,” he retorts, but it’s wry instead of prickly, and he thinks that’s all the progress anyone could ask.

Emma certainly seems pleased, flashing him a rare grin before she twitches her head toward the door again. Cas can sense a pair of bright, familiar souls approaching the doorway; he reaches out a hand to touch Emma’s shoulder. “Friendly,” he tells her, serious.

He knows far too well the environment she was forced to grow up in. He will never treat her fears or phobias as anything less than serious.

“Howdy,” Jody’s ringing voice accompanies the opening of the door, the sound of two pairs of feet tromping down the metal stairway. Cas leads the three of them toward the open entryway; he is looking forward to introducing a more feminine element to Emma’s life.

“Jody, Charlie,” he greets, stepping close to give each of them a hug. These women are much more generous with their hugs than the Winchesters, who typically wait until one or the other of them has passed too close to Death’s scythe before they exchange physical affection. He much prefers this openness, and has hopes that it will slowly rub off on the rest of the family.

They have gotten better, recently.

“Cas,” Charlie beams, then looks over his shoulder and her brows shoot up, a cautious smile touching her mouth. “And this is…?”

Damn Dean Winchester to the depths of – well. Not Hell, that’s far too literal for either of them. But the depths of something. The ocean, maybe. Or at least a small lake.

He turns them around and tugs Jody along too. Emma is standing in the hall entrance, her arms folded tightly around her middle and those familiar green eyes darting back and forth between his companions. Benny is behind her, a steady, solid wall of silent comfort. “Emma,” Cas calls gently, and her gaze settles on him. “This is Jody, and Charlie. Charlie, Jody, this is Emma.” And. Dean might yell about it, but if he wanted to be the one to introduce her he should have told Charlie about her sooner. “Emma Winchester.” 


End file.
